Constant changes, loss of power leave TN teachers deflated

Nov. 24, 2013

Fourth-grade teacher Brit Sikes talks with Alex Odom and Grace Lee about the Trail of Tears at Nashville's Shayne Elementary. Sikes is among teachers who say they're forced to spend too much time focused on making students score highly on tests at one level instead of preparing them for the next year, college and beyond. / Samuel M. Simpkins / The Tennessean

Some Tennessee teachers say their professional morale is abysmal after a three-year statewide pounding that ended the promises of contract negotiations and annual raises, then tied their tenure and teaching licenses to student test scores — even if the subjects they teach don’t appear on standardized tests.

In the meantime, they’ve been asked to adjust to two major jumps in education standards — one that Tennessee took on its own in 2010 and then, this year, teaching to the Common Core State Standards, a national consortium to make sure kids in 45 states are reaching the same goals at the same time.

While other states experiment with some reforms affecting teachers, none is moving as quickly as Tennessee. That’s appropriate, groups behind the changes say, because Tennessee has lagged in the bottom third of states for education performance for decades. It’s like removing a Band-Aid, one reform leader said — better to rip it off quickly than bear the agony of peeling it off slowly.

Considering national rhetoric and Tennessee’s timeline of reforms, it would seem the wound has been schools full of teachers basking in their union contracts and permanent jobs while student learning languished.

But the state’s superintendents and teachers, who say they’ve been reticent to speak up because they’re either too afraid or don’t want to look resistant to change, are pushing back. Unions in at least five districts have publicized votes of no confidence in Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman, including the one in Williamson County, Tennessee’s perennial highest-performing district.

In September, about 60 superintendents sent a letter to Gov. Bill Haslam, criticizing his choice of education commissioner and asking for time to see whether one reform has an effect before implementing the next. The governor asked them to back off his appointee. Two months later, Haslam and Huffman celebrated Tennessee students’ learning gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. They were the second-best in the nation, behind Washington, D.C.

Teachers celebrated, too, but when they talk about the reforms, their frustration is palpable. Many say it’s more likely strengthening Tennessee’s curriculum led to the boost rather than changes related to teacher employment.

Many say they’re forced to spend too much time focused on making students score highly on tests at one level — the level they teach — instead of preparing them for the next year, college and beyond.

“I have 22 real, little people in front of me,” said Brit Sikes, who teaches fourth grade at Nashville’s Shayne Elementary. “I’m not going to worry about getting evaluated on 15 percent of this and 35 percent of that. I know I need to prepare them for this test, but I also need to prepare them for when this test is gone.”

Sikes said it saddened her to earn a composite score of 3 out of 5 on her evaluation last year — even though she was regarded highly enough to bring training on the Common Core back to her peers. This year, she said, she’s teaching in a way that hopefully gets higher scores on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program.

The evaluation scores are composed of 50 percent principals’ observations, 35 percent students’ value-added scores from the TCAP and 15 percent other data individual schools select, such as graduation rates or ACT scores. In the cases of teachers whose subjects aren’t tested on the TCAP — which are the majority — the entire school’s learning gains count.

Those teachers include Chuck Cardona, a Nashville School of the Arts foreign language chair who wrote a Tennessean opinion page piece on teacher policy in July. He’s no calmer on the topic now.

“I’m tired of being picked on by people who have no respect for education,” he said this month. “Going back to grad school, one of my professors said teachers in Tennessee don’t stand up for ourselves, and I think part of that is because we’re so stinking busy teaching. Teachers always believe the best of people, so they don’t realize that the actions being taken are not for their benefit.”

Huffman — who taught in Houston for two years with Teach for America before becoming a lawyer — said he’s heard the charge that teacher morale has never been lower each year since he arrived in Tennessee in 2011. Pointing to the newest Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning survey, which polls Tennessee teachers on working conditions, he said the numbers don’t bear the allegation out.

In Davidson County, for instance, the survey shows better teacher attitudes in nearly every measure, including huge jumps since 2011 on having focused time for student instruction and access to technology.

“I think it shows that actually most people come to work in an environment that’s very conducive to feeling good about your job,” he said.

While some had speculated that teachers would leave the profession in large numbers after the implementation of evaluations, Huffman said that didn’t actually happen.

“I think sometimes those statements are overblown, and it’s just hard to respond to anecdotal claims, especially when actual evidence and data is showing something that is pretty different,” he said.

Fertile ground for reform

Southern governors started turning their attention to education in the 1980s, acknowledging they’d have to improve it to support job growth, said Jeffrey Henig, a Columbia University professor of political science and education. The Reagan administration released the groundbreaking study “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, revealing that future teachers were attending underperforming colleges of education, entering low-paid educator jobs and turning out high percentages of students who were functionally illiterate or couldn’t pass college entrance exams.

These days, deep-pocketed education reformers scan the horizon for states where their ideas will get a warm reception. Tennessee, with its history of low performance and a like-minded Republican governor and legislature who can push things through, has been fertile ground.

“I’m not of the mind to say it’s a uniform omnipotent conspiracy, which is not to say it isn’t a powerful movement,” Henig said. “They run in similar waters because they’re looking for places where there is potential for change, where the opposition for change is, for one reason or another, back on its heels.

“Some are companies that have an investment in testing and assessment, some are nonprofits that are considering the possibility of curriculum tied to the Common Core, some are free-market enthusiasts who see this as a precursor to a more fully voucherized or choice kind of system.”

Groups exerting significant influence here have been K12, a for-profit company that runs the state’s largest virtual school; Teach for America, a nonprofit that coaches new graduates without education degrees into short-term teaching jobs; and StudentsFirst, a reform group headed by former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is Huffman’s ex-wife.

StudentsFirst sprinkled about a half-million dollars in 2012 to Tennessee legislative and school board candidates. It keeps a database of reforms in each state, assigning them numbers by how well their education policy lines up with what StudentsFirst believes is best.

As for the way Tennessee’s reforms have upset educators, Eric Lerum, StudentsFirst’s vice president of national policy, said that’s to be expected and will fade out as time passes. He called criticisms that groups like his don’t believe in public education, or even want to eliminate it, “offensive.”

“When you are trying to implement change with folks who have been part of a system that has been dysfunctional for decades — not just for students and parents, but educators — you have to recognize that and deal with that,” Lerum said. “We need lots of teachers, and there are lots out there that know change needs to happen. They welcome reform.”

And that offends Kevin King, the head of the Williamson County Educators Association who presided over the recent no-confidence vote in Huffman. He said he’s watching longtime teachers retire sooner than they’d like while others leave the state to teach elsewhere.

“I still laugh when you call it reform,” said King, a music teacher at Heritage Middle School. “It’s the politicians doing what they want, and they call it reform. They want to pay as little as possible, and they want to privatize as much as possible.

“They want to stomp out the profession.”

The retirement rate for Tennessee teachers increased from 2 percent in 2008 to 3.5 percent in 2012, a February report from the Tennessee Department of Education’s Office of Research and Policy showed. It attributes the increase to higher standards for teachers and said the ones of retirement age choosing to leave score lower on evaluations than those who stay.

Next up for legislature

With the next legislative session looming, it’s tough to know which new reforms will pop up or which failed ones will be back. And some of the changes affecting teachers never went through the legislature — the Tennessee Board of Education changed the pay scale and ended bumps for higher degrees.

A plan to fund private-school educations with public dollars through vouchers failed last session over how broad the program should be and probably will return. There’s also talk of a statewide charter-school authorizer that could take the decision on whether charter schools can open out of the hands of local districts.

Cathy Kolb, a special education teacher at Moore Magnet in Clarksville, said she was glad to see the advent of teacher evaluations, although she questions their snapshot approach — measuring observations of a certain lesson on a certain day and how a student performs on a test given one day a year. But having taught for 30 years, she’s seen colleagues who didn’t belong in classrooms and welcomed a way to get them removed.

After welcoming evaluations, she said, it’s been tough to see the value of constant change.

“It has been just such a whirlwind. This is what we’re doing, no here’s what we’re doing. Once we think we’ve got a handle on this mandate, now we’re doing this now,” Kolb said. “We cannot seem to get going in the direction we need to go.”

“Why don’t see if this mandate works before we move onto another one?”

Joey Garrison contributed to this report. Contact Heidi Hall at 615-726-5977 or hhall@tennessean.com.